Verbera, catenae, concubitus: slaves, violence and vulnerability in Ovid's Amores

This thesis investigates two anomalous factors in Ovid's Amores that differentiate this work from the rest of Roman elegiac poetry: the large and varied cast of slave characters who interact with the poetry's speaker, the amator, and the speaker's focus on the female body. It argues that these factors are related: by juxtaposing the desired body of the female love-object with the brutalized bodies of slaves, Ovid exposes the reality of the elegiac woman's social inferiority to the amator and her consequent physical vulnerability to violence at his hands